5 February 2024

By Tim Koch

Tim Koch calls “Weigh Enough!”

With December’s release of the long awaited movie, The Boys in the Boat, and with the recent HTBS posts on the critics’ reviews of the film and of Malcolm Knight’s pictures looking behind the scenes during its making, I had thought that the story had reached its natural conclusion. Over the last eleven years, HTBS has posted over fifty pieces with the tags “Boys in the Boat” and/or “Daniel James Brown”. However, I have recently discovered two delightful videos on YouTube that make a more befitting end to the Boys’ story.

Last December, BITB author, Daniel James Brown, told Time magazine:

They all survived the war years. Most of them did not actually wind up serving in the military during the war. They were a little older than the usual draftees at that point. The ones with engineering degrees were put to work designing and building aircraft for the war effort. Joe married Joyce and went to work for Boeing as an engineer. They all went on to have good, solid middle-class lives. Aside from (Chuck Day), a smoker who died early, the rest of them all lived into their 80s or 90s… 

Every 10 years or so, they’d do a reunion row out of Lake Washington. And then they’d have informal reunions at one another’s backyard picnics and things like that. The families were all in touch with each other. It was very touching. What was remarkable to me, as I met the family members of all of the rowers, was how bonded together they were for the rest of their lives.

In the video below from the TV channel, King 5 Seattle, Joe Rantz’s grandson, Fred, shows us around the Seattle house that Joe and his wife bought in 1941 and where they spent their entire married life. Wonderfully, it is filled with family and rowing memorabilia and Fred now lives there, keeping it in the Rantz family. 

Another video from the same channel shows marvellous film of the 1986 50th Anniversary Reunion Row of the 1936 UW “crew team.”

Full marks to the King 5 for producing this. I particularly like how the physical strength of these men in their 70s shines through – particularly Joe Rantz. My only criticism would be that the French are not giving the Nazi Salute as stated, it is the (admittedly similar) Olympic Salute.

It is said that the Boys’ story is a universal one. This is true but, in another sense, it is a very American one. It is a tale of people who started with nothing and who went onto realise the fabled American Dream in both a sporting sense in their youth and in an economic sense in later life.

Cox Robert ‘Bobby’ Moch (1914-2005), Stroke Donald ‘Don’ Hume (1915-2001), 7 Joseph ‘Joe’ Rantz (1914-2007), 6 George ‘Shorty’ Hunt (1916-1999), 5 Jim ‘Stub’ McMillin (1914-2005), 4 John ‘Johnny’ White (1916-1997), 3 Gordon ‘Gordy’ Adam (1915-1992), 2 Charles ‘Chuck’ Day (1914-1962), Bow Roger Morris (1915-2009).

*…we’ll row forever, steady from stroke to bow, and nothing in life shall sever the chain that is round us now… (The Eton Boating Song).